


like the morning is always new, i'll give it back to you

by fairmanor



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: (Almost) Post-Canon, David Rose Deserves Nice Things, David Rose Loves Patrick Brewer, Early Mornings, Episode: s06e14 Happy Ending, Family, Ficlet, Fluff, Husbands, Introspection, Just Married, M/M, Patrick Brewer loves David Rose, Tenderness, episode coda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 19:35:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29319504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairmanor/pseuds/fairmanor
Summary: The early hours of September 4th. A ficlet set between the wedding and Johnny and Moira leaving.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer/David Rose, Stevie Budd/Alexis Rose
Comments: 41
Kudos: 208





	like the morning is always new, i'll give it back to you

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "From All You Give" by The Paper Kites, which I like to think was the last song played at their wedding.

Historically, when David gets this emotionally charged, he whittles down his surroundings to a couple of fundamental truths.

It’s often a lot of stills. A lot of justs. _You’re still alive. You’re still in New York. It’s just a scratch. You’re just getting lost in your head._ He’d tried it once when he first came to Schitt’s Creek, but of course it hadn’t worked because being _still in Schitt’s Creek_ was the problem for the best part of their first year here.

Since things started to go his way, he’s been too wrapped up in the here and now to need it. Life has been buoyed on blissful routine, a stability he never thought he’d be able to afford back when he had money. He’s never felt as physically and deeply as he did when he was on the nauseous brink of a comedown or the precipice of heartbreak. It’s an easy life, this one he’s made, the one he just vowed to continue making, and thankfully it doesn’t call for the heady fight or flight that defined his twenties.

Until now.

Now, he’s blinking awake at the white-clothed table of a café he used to hate, though he was never really asleep. Yesterday’s rain is evaporating, pluming up in cloudy silver shards. The way the sunlight catches through the window makes them look like the dust that dances under his nose when he wakes up in Patrick’s apartment. And that’s what makes this feeling, the one he can liken to his old instincts, so bizarre. He isn’t choked by the thick smog of the city or someone else’s weighted duvet. He’s draped in the aftermath of the best night of his life, caressed by the sun on one cheek and by his husband’s sleepy, wandering fingers on the other.

He’s just in Schitt’s Creek. He’s _still_ at home.

Yet he’s so full of love that it’s painful, and it scares him.

In an hour, his parents are going to take their bags and put them in a car and drive down the street and not turn around for at least a year. In an hour, there’ll be no more _David! I pray you’re still listening to me!_ or _kids, we’re just coming in to say goodnight._ Even if David never listened or never wanted a goodnight…he did. He always did.

Beside him, Patrick snuffles and stirs, his forehead still resting on his arms. His head keens upwards and he cracks his neck from side to side. David tuts softly and rubs at it. He can’t wait to nag him about that habit for the rest of their lives.

“Morning, sleepy,” he says into the quiet, still air of the empty café. His mouth feels sour and tacky, his ears still ringing with a heady blend of everything they played last night.

Patrick sits up properly, stretching out his back with a soft groan. The last guest didn’t trail out until 5am, and by that time David and Patrick were too drunk to go but too sober to stay, so they sat themselves down at the middle table of the café and the next thing David knew it was 7:24 and Stevie was texting him, reminding him to set an alarm for half 8. She and Alexis disappeared a while ago.

“Morning,” Patrick mumbles, bringing his feet up onto the chair and resting his hands on his knees. He lowers his face to the backs of his hands and scrubs his face across them, and if David wasn’t feeling the exact same brand of absurd tiredness he would probably laugh and ask Patrick what the hell he was doing.

They sit in silence for a moment, looking around the room in a way that reminds David of a week ago when they thought they’d be leaving Patrick’s apartment behind for good. Well, they _are,_ he supposes _._ Soon enough. But it’s only to put deeper roots in the place that was always meant for them.

“Floor’s still sticky from that drink Rachel dropped,” Patrick says, tapping his toe into a gummy spot on the linoleum. David huffs out a laugh at the memory of Rachel wobbling on one heel, accidentally tipping half a bottle of wine under the table.

“Should we come back later to help Twyla clean up?” David says.

Patrick drops his head onto one shoulder and looks at David pointedly.

“I mean _later_ later, once we’re ready,” he continues.

“David, think about going home after this morning, getting ready for bed, _sleeping…_ ”

“Yeah, you win.”

“We’re really not gonna get out of bed for at least a day. Well, I’m not, anyway.”

David smiles. It’s not like Patrick to voluntarily step away from the crowd or cop out of helping out. It’s not like David to want to spend his first day as a married man cleaning a café. Marriage has changed them already, it seems. Or maybe it’s just safe little towns and the love inside them that do that.

And that’s still all David can feel right now. Love. It hurts, but at the same time it’s a salve to know that his parents will be taking cases of his love with them, sitting it on the mantle, dusting it clean. To know that although they’re leaving, they love him. They’re leaving, but they want him. They might be 2,500 miles away but they’ll be safety netted by the same love that’s kept them all together in the past three years, and until now David didn’t know he could have love that stretched so far. He hopes they don’t forget that, in the same way he hopes he’ll never forget it.

“Have you had any texts from Stevie?” Patrick says.

“Just reminding me to meet them out front at half 8.”

Patrick cocks an eyebrow at the “them”. The Alexis-and-Stevie entity that David and Patrick had been exchanging glances about all night that had now mysteriously disappeared.

“Do you – do you think they…?”

“Oh, yeah,” David says, and Patrick snorts with incredulous laughter.

“Oh my God.”

“What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Nothing,” Patrick says, with his familiar cheeky grin that almost always means _this is not nothing._ “It’s just funny. That’s she’s – Stevie’s – with both of you now.”

It takes David a second to click. Then, “oh my God, ew! Stop laughing, that’s a disgusting thought I didn’t want to have on my first day of marriage.”

Patrick stops laughing at that. His face goes soft, like he’s just remembered.

“Oh yeah,” he says, and the reverence in his voice is richer and more lovely than the speaker at any service or mass David has ever been to.

He looks at Patrick for a long time, rumpled and hungover, his wedding ring brand new, and knows that this image will be one that sits at the forefront of the gallery of his mind for years to come. This is a moment he’ll chase; one he’ll think about with a pull in his chest that sounds like their wedding song and smells like rain.

But the thing about declarative memories, David knows, is that they’re harder to make if you _think_ about how you’re going to crave them one day. So he doesn’t think. He just looks, and etches the outline of his new husband’s shirt creases and rough stubbled cheeks with the finest of pen nibs.

“I’m going to miss my parents,” David says, to take his mind off forever. To stay in the now.

Patrick leans in to wrap his arms around David, nuzzling his head into the space between the base of David’s neck and unbuttoned collar.

“I know. I’ll miss them too.”

“It won’t even be Christmas,” David says, his voice cracking. “They’re going to stay out there for a change.”

“Your mom will want to come back for the play, though,” Patrick murmurs, running an absent hand over David’s arm. “That’s not quite a year.”

David sighs. He’s right. He’s always right when it comes to David needing to calm down. What’s less than a year? It’s a drop in the sunlit, sealine horizon of the rest of his life.

David turns his flat palm from side to side, tracing the line between his rough hands and smooth, glinting gold rings. It looks like a line from one of Patrick’s songs, nestled between something about their morning routine and a sentiment re their golden years.

“We can call them whenever you’d like,” Patrick says.

Out of habit, David scoffs. “I think I’m going to need a good few weeks of peace and quiet first.”

“You’ll want to video call them to show them the new house, though.”

“Oh, yeah. And the street. Do you think Mom will want to call and go on one of our walks at the same time? It might be hard to organise with the time zones, but – oh, what about new stuff at the store? What if we decide to redecorate when the new art comes in? I’ll send them photos. And if there’s anything going on with the Jazzagals I’ll –”

“David, David. Shh.” Patrick is pacifying his stream of thoughts with a hand on his chest, his face unbearably fond. “It’s okay. They’ll still be around to keep up with what’s going on. They’re just a phone call away.”

Ah, yes. _Still. Just._ That’s the rhythm of this old feeling, the one that’s crawled up to meet him. It’s not entirely unwelcome. It just looks different now, like the rest of him. It’s adapted, learned to thrive outside the confines of an old half-life.

“You’re allowed to miss, them, though,” Patrick adds, as an afterthought. “You’re allowed to be sad.”

“Mm,” David agrees. 

This is true. It’s true, and he will be. He also won’t be.

Later, he’ll walk back to Patrick’s car, get in it and drive in the opposite direction to his parents. He’ll get ready, wash the night off his body, brush his teeth, get into his sweatpants and sleep. He’ll luxuriate in a patch of sun, let his husband call him _my husband_ and slowly take him apart; undo him, then redo him all over again. Later still, he’ll sit on Patrick’s kitchen counter. The kitchen smells like overripe banana at the moment. The smell eats where they eat and they let it. He’ll drink tea, probably the fifth or sixth cup of the day, and it’s their first day as husbands but they won’t be making anything special because they still have leftover pasta in the fridge.

His parents might call when they land. They might not. It’ll be okay, because the vestiges of their life are still here, in a motel and a garden and the booth they claimed as their own in a café they used to hate.

And he’ll never be unsafe or unloved again. It’s impossible.

He’s still in Schitt’s Creek.


End file.
